No School of Literary Theory for Multiple Personality

As we saw in the last post, which quoted Margaret Atwood, novelists have long known, or at least suspected, that they have multiple personality. However, novelists only create literature. They are not in charge of literary theory. And of the more than twenty schools of literary theory, not one addresses multiple personality.

What about the psychoanalytic school of literary theory? Classical Freudian theory—whose model of the mind has only one, undivided consciousness—implies that multiple personality is theoretically impossible.

Multiple personality involves multiple (or divided) consciousness, with each alternate personality defined by its having an autonomous consciousness, a mind of its own. They—autonomous characters, alternate narrators, alternate personalities—think for themselves; therefore, they are. And Freud's single-consciousness model cannot account for how this could ever happen.

The history of Freud’s mistake is discussed in the June 2013 post.